Thursday, January 29, 2009

Bishop Williamson has Company: Another "Traditionalist" Priest Denies the Holocaust

In an interview in the Italian newspaper, La TribunadiTreviso, another traditionalist priest, i.e. one who rejects the decisions of Vatican II, has come out as a Holocaust denier...sort of.

[For a translated transcript of the priest's interview click here and scroll down.]

Repeating standard denial fare, Rev. FlorianoAbrahamowicz said that there were gas chambers but they were only used to disinfect inmates.

Then taking a slightly different tack he acknowledged that six million Jews were killed during WWII. Why did he do that? So that he could then compare the Holocaust to "other genocides" which do not receive the same amount of public recognition.

He included in these other genocides, the Allied bombing of German cities.

This, by the way, is also a standard ploy by deniers. They rely on "immoral equivalencies" and argue that, while the Germans may have done wrong, the Allies, who bombed German cities, committed equal wrongs.

And, not surprisingly, he included Israel's actions in Gaza in these genocides.

"And the Israelis can't tell me that the genocide that they suffered from the Nazis is less serious than that of Gaza because they have killed several thousand people while the Nazis killed 6 million," he said.

Finally -- and also not surprisingly -- he denied that he or Lefebvre were antisemitic, and pointed out that his father's family was Jewish.

Then, unable to contain himself, he described the Jewish people as "God killers" and called on them to "embrace our Lord Jesus Christ."

[This, of course, runs counter to Vatican II, which rejected the notion that all Jews then or now were responsible for the death of Jesus.]

This not Abrahamowicz first brush with controversy. In 2006 he said on television that that a a German SS officer who, in 1944, killed 335 Italian civilians in retaliation for the death of 33 German soldiers should not have been convicted of war crimes or considered an “executioner” but rather a soldier who acted “with regret and a heavy heart.”

In 2008, after Cardinal from Milan supported the opening of new mosques in Italy, Abrahamowicz, speaking on Italian radio, described Tettamanzi was an example of “infiltrators” attempting to “subvert the church from within.”

It cannot be making the Vatican happy that Abrahamowicz made these statements the day after the Pope's statements at his Wednesday audience.

As with Williamson, he is a follower of Bishop Marcel Lefebvre.

He may equivocate about his Holocaust denial but about his antisemitism there is no doubt.